


In such a jocund company

by maybethrice



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Jane Austen Fusion, Alternate Universe - Regency, F/M, Mutual Pining, Remix, Second Chances, Temporarily Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-15 06:40:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8046115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybethrice/pseuds/maybethrice
Summary: It would be no matter at all for Captain Snow to return to the north after seven months’ absence, had Sansa’s heart not changed entirely in that time. A remix of Colonel Brandon and Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility.





	In such a jocund company

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the second fic I wrote for this year's Jon x Sansa remix! This one did not end up in the main collection, but I took the chance to polish it up before posting here! I really enjoy the dynamic that Brandon and Marianne have, and though I probably took rather a lot of liberties with the prompt (such as it is), I had great fun translating it to our favorites. 
> 
> Title from Wordsworth's _I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud._

*

The far-off sound of bells from town announced that it was only eight in the morning, just shy of the appropriate waking time for a gently bred lady of quality keeping country hours. The bright, cheery sound carried over hill and valley and into the Eyrie’s smallest sitting room. At a time when the country seat of Lord Arryn had been vital and lively, this room had been appointed for the musical education of young ladies of the family, but as the young Lord Arryn had no sisters its pianoforte had sat unused until his mother, the dowager Lady Arryn, had converted it to a fourth sitting room that was equally disused, on account of her disposition to entertain as little as possible.

It was this that room that had become a refuge for the misses Stark after they had been sent to their aunt’s care following the untimely death of their parents. And it was in this room that the younger Miss Stark found Miss Sansa already awake, dressed, and rigorously fluffing every pillow. As it was far too early for Sansa to have broken her fast, and because Arya suspected she knew what this fit of anxiety was related to, she lingered in the doorway for only a moment before she marched in and snatched a stack of sheet music out of her sister’s hand. 

Sansa’s answering yelp was immediate and indignant, but she did not seize it back from Arya.

“I don’t have time for games this morning, Arya,” she said irritably, returning to the pillows. “Captain Snow may come to call this morning.”

“I suppose you expect him to break his fast with us, then,” Arya teased, but she opened the piano bench and dropped the sheet music in with an unladylike roll of her eyes. “Perhaps he’ll ride over from the Tarlys in his dressing gown.”

“Oh, don’t jape, Arya.” Sansa hugged one of the pillows to her stomach and frowned at her sister. She wore her most becoming dove grey morning dress, a demure choice suitable for a young lady who was only recently released from the greys and lavenders of half-mourning. It was also, as Sansa knew perfectly, a very becoming dress that showcased her fine figure and understated elegance. 

Arya’s joking, however, was not far from Sansa’s wildest expectations. She sank down onto the worn couch and held the pillow tighter to her bosom, staring absently at the faded paper on the walls. 

“I suppose you’ve seen him, then? Jon? Unless you’ve had some feeling come over you. A dream, or something.”

“I went for a walk yesterday,” explained Sansa, seeming to deflate into the cushions, but she reached up to adjust the handsome grey silk ribbon in her hair. “And Captain Snow was out riding.”

That was, apparently, all she needed to say to silence Arya. Abandoning her hope of a pleasant breakfast, Arya sat down next to her sister, pulling her into a soft side embrace.

Jon, Sansa thought privately. Dear Jon, who had sought out the sisters Stark after their parents died for love of their elder brother; who had been as a brother to him when they fought together on the Continent, years before Robb died, too. Jon, who lacked the easy manner and social charms she had once thought so important, and who did not bother himself with idle conversation. Jon, who had loved Sansa deeply and without reservation for her social status or lack of fortune. Who she had spurned for his lack of sensibility, mistaking his serious nature for taciturn brooding, and flaunting her attachment with the shockingly unsuitable Mr Hardyng.

It had been some seven months since either of them had last seen Captain Snow, since he had left for his business in London and they had been left behind in the Vale. Excepting, of course, the occasional visit to the Tarlys two towns over, which had for a time diminished during Mrs Tarly’s confinement and subsequent birth of her second child. After that unspeakable business with Mr Hardyng, Sansa’s life had become a routine of quiet misery without a perceivable end except to yield to her aunt’s wish that she might marry the young Lord Arryn when he was of an age. 

Not that Arya had not tried to warn her before, Sansa thought bitterly, pressing her cheek into her sister’s shoulder. Had she a shred of good sense perhaps she would be married to a man devoted to her happiness and comfort, to a man she had come to respect and adore by his own merits, rather than anxiously rearranging a dull sitting room in her aunt’s least favorite wing of the manor and hoping she would not be left on the shelf. Or worse: married to her cousin.

“Well,” said Arya slowly, helping Sansa to adjust her curls under the ribbon. “Even if Captain Snow suggested that he might pay us a call, I cannot reasonably anticipate his arrival at so early an hour.” 

Sansa pulled away from her sister and replaced the pillow beside her. “Country hours are different,” she explained with a flare of drama, as though Arya could not have noticed this minute difference in ten months since they had been exiled from their Uncle Edmure’s townhouse in a fashionable quarter of London.

“How stupid of me not to know!” Arya burst out, rolling her eyes and drawing Sansa to her feet with her in hope of enticing her with a cup of tea to drive away the chill left by the fog outside. “Come, breakfast may help your nerves, and I can’t imagine Jon would come any earlier than ten-thirty.”

Sansa would later reflect that Arya was at least half correct in this. After all, tea did nothing at all to settle her nerves, for Sansa only held her cup between her fingers and stared absently out of the small window of the breakfast room for the duration of the meal. She also succumbed to a fit of the sullens no fewer than three times, convincing herself that her meeting with Jon in the fog the previous morning had been a dream, or that Jon’s diffident expression of desire to call on her the following day had been nothing more than the polite thing for him to say in so awkward a situation as meeting a young woman who scorned him. The worst of these came upon her when she reflected on the notion that Jon might yet reject her and that Sansa would have earned such treatment, having abused an honorable man’s affections and caused him to break his heart over her.

But when Jon rode his handsome black gelding up the drive and left Ghost with Lord Arryn’s stableboy, it was at a perfectly unobjectionable quarter past eleven. He was shown to the shabby old sitting room, where Sansa found him politely examining the bookshelves with his hat clutched in his hands mere minutes later. 

Arya had taken Sansa to the garden as another means to divert her pent-up nervous energy, and it was from there that Sansa came in a hurry, leaving Arya to trail after her with a bright laugh and shout that there was little fear that Jon might leave without seeing Sansa after coming so far.

Sansa’s cheeks were pink with exertion and a curl fell loose and unbound on her creamy neck as she smoothed down her dress outside the door. All her fears from earlier in the morning came rolling back like storm clouds when she saw him again, half-turned toward her with his grey eyes lifted in greeting. It could not have been more different than his greeting the afternoon before, when he came riding up the road and found her standing alone by a stone wall with her bonnet in hand and a war of emotion on her face.

Sansa thought of his shocked expression and how his gloved hands tightened on the reins of his horse, which cantered sideways in response to its master’s anxiety. How he had then jumped down to greet her so warmly that Sansa thought he had never broken his heart for her. It had given her hope to see him unreserved, a flash of sensibility in a man she once dismissed for the solemn nature she had so abhorred.

But Sansa was no longer a naive girl who wished for nothing more than a life of passion, of beautiful things unburdened by the chains of sense. How many things had she wanted that were anathema to her now? And how many more Sansa had ignored that she would now have gone to the Devil himself to have instead?

In the cool morning light – for the small sitting room faced the south and had no natural light of its own – Jon was far more composed than before, his gloves and hat in his hand when he greeted her with all the restraint that was proper for a man of his position. His riding attire was more handsome than the worn-out set he’d worn the day before and she saw that he had put no small effort in the creases of his cravat, though it had not the perfectly starched points Sansa had once associated with a man of good taste. Once, a man of good taste and handsome looks was all she cared for. 

_How stupid,_ thought Sansa as she withdrew her hand from Jon’s greeting, tucking it into her skirts and wondering how she had never before that the whiskered kiss of her hand was exhilarating. 

“I had not known to expect you back in the country,” she said, having somehow unstuck her throat when she sank to the edge of a comfortable chair. She had been to see Gilly and baby Sam not a week before and, though Sansa had confessed how often she thought longingly of the long-absent Captain Snow, Gilly had said nothing of Jon’s impending arrival.

Jon stood by the bookcase, his knuckles white around his hat, and Sansa worried the muslin of her dress between her fingers. Now that all the pleasantries had been observed, it was too terrible to see him again and not know how it was he felt for her, or even if all the affection she had grown for him in his absence was only the fancy borne of misery. What if he still loved her? she wondered. What if he didn’t?

“I came on short notice,” explained Jon shortly, and Sansa saw that he had begun to twist his gloves nervously in his hands. “In truth, I had no intention of returning to the north.”

“I see.” Her voice failed her again, trying to remember just what it was she had said to him when he had left those months before. What she might possibly say to him now. 

Jon shifted from one foot to another, twisting his gloves around until they gave a quiet squelching noise between his hands. “I planned to ship out with my regiment again before I had a letter from Sam some four days ago.”

Then he had planned to leave, she realized. To leave to where she might never see him again. Sansa could no longer quash her emotions down and, though there was nothing sensible about it, she rose to her feet in a rush. At this, his face – not so handsome as her suitors before him, but impossibly dear to her – broke into an expression of plain surprise not unlike the one he had worn when he kissed her gloved hand the day before, as kindly and formally as if they stood in a ballroom and not on a road with her hems covered in dust. This tension between them was as intolerable as the prospect of another moment of looking upon him without knowing his heart. 

“I know I ought to be delicate, to be sensible to your feelings, but I cannot,” said Sansa anxiously, all her breath rushing from her chest and leaving her empty and hollow and fearful. “Your affection for me was plain seven months past. Tell me: did you leave the north because you thought your suit impossible?”

“My suit _was_ impossible, dear lady,” Jon answered slowly, but the edge on the way he pronounced those syllables was indecipherable to her. “I could not but believe that it was.”

“It was.” Sansa had not meant to be so honest as that, so lacking in sensibility on a topic that could not but bring him pain. Or, if not him, then the pain it would bring her. Sansa wanted to wring her hands. If she could have written him those long months since last seeing him, she might have been more certain of her heart, and of his. “It was impossible then, when I was sillier than any girl alive, and I could not see…” 

At this, Jon’s face colored and she fell to miserable silence, unwilling to expose any more of her wretched sensibility. Sansa folded her hands before her and tilted her gaze to the faded rug beneath her slippered feet, the woven line that stretched between them and Jon’s gleaming boots. Perhaps Jon would leave now, unsettled by her shocking display, and she would be forced to explain to Arya what had happened. Forced to marry Robin and endure a loveless marriage and a lifetime of her Aunt Lysa breathing down her neck.

“Sansa.” 

In her wallowing, she had not seen him lift his feet as if pulled from stone and cross the shabby carpet to her. She did not see anything at all until his curled forefinger tipped her chin upward in so intimate a gesture Sansa thought she could cry. It was his eyes, however, that carried the weighty answers she had so longed for since he had left. That he was precisely the man she had judged him, and that, for all his disappointment, he had not broken his heart over her. And then she did cry, little pricks of joy springing at the corner of her eyes and leaving tracks like dew along the side of her upturned face. 

Though this was clearly not at all the reaction Jon had anticipated, he brushed aside one stray tear and she understood that he had come all the way from London for her on the promise of some letter sent from the Tarlys. Gilly, of course, had been among the conspirators against her pervasive gloom. Very likely Arya, too. Sansa blinked away her tears. 

“Is my suit still impossible?” asked Jon, solemn and sensible, with his thumb breezing across the delicate bone of her cheek as soft and kind as a summer breeze through the daffodils that grew wild across the hills. 

“ _Jon,_ ” she breathed, soft as the answering rustle of flowers and pushed her face into his hand. “If you do not know now, then I must—if you would hear my most sincere regrets and know that my heart has turned, and I have come to admire and love you like no man. If I could but tell you how foolish I have been, how deeply I love you like no other, you might know that it is not the least impossible.”

“I am sure I will hear all of those things,” said Jon with the crook of a smile ghosting across his solemn face just before he laid an imprudent kiss on her wavering mouth, silencing the tumult in her. “All those and many more beside, my dear.”


End file.
